DOGE ‘Wall of Receipts’ padded figures, included baseless claims: watchdog

A website created by President Donald Trump’s DOGE to tally its purported cost savings contained myriad data quality issues and inaccuracies, a congressional watchdog reported Thursday.

In a review of the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts” website, the Government Accountability Office found the group didn’t use transparent methods to produce its figures, included lease terminations that predated DOGE’s creation, and listed savings with unknown origins.

The findings again call into question the roughly $215 billion DOGE claimed to have saved the government and adds to reporting on the deficiencies of the website’s accounting. The New York Times, for example, has previously documented errors and deletions on that page. FedScoop has reported inconsistencies between officials’ publicly stated savings claims and the figures included on the website.

GAO concluded its report by recommending that the website prominently display the existence of the data-quality issues and limitations.

“Prominently displaying data limitations would enhance the value of the Wall of Receipts by providing users with the information that they need to interpret and use the data appropriately,” the report said. 

According to a letter included within the report, the audit was ordered by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Peters is the ranking member on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Blumenthal is ranking member of its subcommittee on investigations.

The report comes a day after GAO released another report that revealed little available documentation of financial disclosures and completion of ethics and records management training by DOGE personnel. While the DOGE temporary organization officially ended July 4, many questions about its activities and impact still linger.

For its own methodology, GAO used the data provided on the Wall of Receipts to reverse-engineer how the DOGE calculated amounts it claimed to have saved and compared it to other federal data sources, such as FDPS.gov and USASpending.gov. (The former website was recently rolled into the latter.)

It selected examples of 31 contracts and 12 grants within agencies that had the highest savings reported to review more closely. Those agencies were the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Health and Human Services for contracts, and just USAID and HHS for grants. The watchdog said it reviewed all 264 leases through the General Services Administration that were listed.

On contracts, GAO found that more than a quarter of the figures listed on the website did not include identifying information, including all of the contracts associated with USAID. Additionally, the watchdog found that more than 2,000 contracts that DOGE claimed were terminated were not actually terminated. 

For more than half of the reported contract savings, DOGE didn’t follow its own methodology for calculations and that methodology itself was limited. It didn’t, for example, include costs related to the action of terminating contracts, the watchdog said. 

GAO also found examples where efficiencies could have been achieved. In a sample of contracts it reviewed, the watchdog found nearly $78 million in de-obligated funds — or those that result from a downward adjustment of a contract — that could reduce spending or be spent elsewhere, and opportunities for a reduction in the contract or its scope that would avoid costs in the future.

“In some cases, however, work and associated costs were shifted to other contracts, which could constrain or eliminate potential savings,” the report said. “We also could not determine the basis for a portion or all of the DOGE reported savings for many of the 21 contracts we reviewed.”

Grant savings claims similarly had documentation issues.

According to GAO, roughly 1 in 5 grants listed as terminated did not have sufficient data to be able to find them on USASpending. Such unidentified items were more than 50% of the grant savings DOGE reported. 

While DOGE claimed its methodology was calculating the difference between the total value of the grant and the amount obligated at the time of its termination, USASpending, the official source for that data, doesn’t have the total value for grants. Using three different methods, the watchdog replicated the figures for nearly 4% of the DOGE estimates, but for the remaining roughly 96%, it’s unknown how the group got that figure.

Finally, GAO found the efficiency group overstated lease savings by more than $80 million due to a number of different errors.

DOGE miscalculated savings by nearly $60 million with no explanation, per the report. Further, GSA officials told the watchdog that 108 of the 264 leases listed by DOGE, accounting for approximately $15 million, were already in the process of termination before the organization was established. And another roughly $7 million resulted from several other types of errors, including listing leases that the watchdog still found were active. 

The watchdog said it provided the report to several federal agencies and the U.S. DOGE Service, formerly the U.S. Digital Service and the White House component the DOGE temporary organization existed within. DOD and HHS provided technical feedback, while GSA, the Department of Energy and Department of State said they didn’t have comment. USDS and USAID, which has now been incorporated into State, didn’t provide comments.

The White House did not respond to FedScoop’s request to comment on the report or whether it would comply with its recommendation.